That AI Art Debate

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THAT AI Debate

The ‘AI Art’ debate has been raging across every social media Terrain since Ted Chiang’s Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art came out in the New Yorker last week.

It’s been fascinating to see all the conversations play out all over the net (If you ignore almost all of the reactionary brain worms from people on both sides). It’s also been the main topic of conversation in several meetings I’ve been in this week – which means it’s been a good week for me – as the only person in the room who actually has an academic background in the Philosophy of the Arts.

While Holly dropped the mic last night “Making models is art“.

Ted Chiang's essay made some good points about art and intentionality, but it is premature to debate about AI making art. For now, AI doesn't exist autonomously. Humans make art with AI models trained on humans.

We train our own models on our own datasets. This project took 18… pic.twitter.com/9k35tViAKi

— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) September 7, 2024

I have a few thoughts of my own. Consider this oar stuck in:

Firstly, I don’t really see—and never have—the product of generative systems as art ‘in and of itself.’ It’s just not a thing I feel is worth arguing about, frankly. Generative AI systems are better seen (as I said back in 2022) as Cultural Technologies. Echoing Holly I said: ‘Models are a medium’

The development of ML tools is as big a deal as the printing press. The technology that begat copyright in the first place. But models are a medium. They aren’t copied with paper and ink. New things emerge (are spawned) out of them.

It’s clear too, that these new technologies will underpin the creative practice and economy of the 21st Century. 

Over the next 20 years the creation of, and ownership of these new cultural technologies has to be redrawn. The entire framework. Culture, copyright, creative remuneration . 

But this future speculative paradigm will emerge out of the conversions and positions we take today. 

At its core, the current debate on AI-generated art misses the point: models and generative systems are better understood as cultural technologies, not independent creators. This perspective shifts the conversation away from questioning if AI makes art, to exploring how these systems transform the creative process itself.

Second, This debate is not happening in isolation. Broader legal and cultural frameworks are also being challenged, as seen in the recent Internet Archive ruling. As I said above, the whole thing needs rethinking. It is wild to me that the progressive-sensible-online-creative-left-wing-position on both the Internet Archive ruling, and Generative AI systems, seems to be call draconian copyright rules that are almost accelerationist in their posture.

Harsher/harder copyright rules that won’t benefit anyone other that massive corporations.
We need to re-think the whole thing.

Here’s a good take on the Internet Archive sitch that flew by on Instagram:

I’ve spent the last 20 years inspired by Lessig that copyright laws need to adapt to new technologies, just as they did in the 20th century with the advent of mass media.

The objectively correct position on all of this (objectivity here being defined as the uncritical acceptance of my views) is the same position I’ve had since I was 14 after I discovered Napster: ‘Fuck Copyright’ – I will not be dissuaded about this.

See also: The quote from further down this post from Paul 65dos in #terminalaccess for a more nuance take.

Third, in 2024 no one would object – at all – at the idea that someone is an ‘Installation Artist’. In fact today we have world builders and experience designers coming out of our ears – people who’s work is the creative manipulation of experience and interaction.

But in the late 60’s / early 70’s this was the subject of a massive fight in the art world. As it was a complete departure from the traditional understanding of exhibitions as presentation of sculpture as ‘form’.

Agreeing with Chaing’s AI isn’t going to make art piece moves us all closer to conservative take along the lines of all art should be “music, pictures and prose”. And thats not a world with an understanding of creative culture that I want to live in.

Fourth, Chaing (I think) wrongly asserts that the legitimacy of “art” hinges on the amount of effort invested in its creation. AND, he insists on measuring a program’s “intelligence” by comparing it to a human mind, instead of recognising its value and functionality on its own terms. Matteo Wong was good on this in the Atlantic

Fifth, as Holly said, “AI doesn’t exist autonomously. Humans make art with AI models trained on humans.” they are new cultural technologies. ‘AI Art’ is already ‘a thing’ without question. The thing that most people don’t like is actually slop, or the question around ‘Art from AI’

Sixth, Sturgeon’s law is primary: ninety percent of everything is crap. This doesn’t just apply to AI art but all creative work made by humans too.

Lastly, (although I could probably sit here all day and think up things to add) My Future Music essay has picked up some steam again as Holly RT’d it.

Building on the above point, this…

As for the aesthetic and cultural merits of AI generated art … I practice discernment.

I trust in my taste.

I’m not going to yuk your yum.

As I said further up, I personally think it’s the models themselves that are the art/the medium. There is actually some real skill and artists involved in developing weights for a model and as more and more people understand how these systems get made we’ll realise that there are artists inside of the big orgs like OpenAI and Meta, doing this work. But it seems like extending the ‘idea’ of installation art or world making into conceptual systems to make infinity machines is a step to far for most.

Finally, exercising my own personal taste. I think *some* products of AI generative systems are really great and not slop at all – actually. For example: 10 dunk cigarettes is a total bop.

And the Trishacode supercut is super entertaining. I can’t even begin to imagine the burst of creativity and ART thats right around the corner:

My favourite bit is when Trish refuses to watch Stranger Things because “I don’t like things that aren’t realistic” lol. The whole thing reminds me of some bizarro show that would have been on Channel 4 late at night in the early 2000’s. The closing rap is also a banger.

Permanently Moved

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

Have a few projects that are quite long durational so I’ll be needing some proper project codewords.

• Kicked off PROJECT ENTRY
• Bunch of calls, round tables, 1 on 1s.
• Caught up with X about PROJECT DIVE (formally Sekret) project
• Did a ton of re-writing and noodling on the long essay for SSR
• Call about a conference I’m speaking at later this year
• Hung out and ate take away with Alex who was in town
• Call with an author who is writing about aphantasia
• Posted the last remaining back issue of SSRZ out to a new subscriber

Terminal Access

Paul ’65dos’ Wolinski wrote a good post about recent Internet Archive copyright decision. I think it’s a good take from someone who’s life has been spent as a working musician.

you could pretty much say the same thing about Spotify, right? They’re allowed to host all the music in the world and arbitrarily decide that they’re not going to pay royalties to artists that don’t get many streams, but you’d better not go to Soulseek and download those songs without paying the artists anything!

Link Garden

Been a busy week on the blog! Woke up Monday with a taste for blogging. If you’re reading via email here’s what you missed:

Aug – Photo-a-Day

Posted my monthly photo-a-day. I’m fast coming up on 1000 days in a row – a number which I mentioned in my 2023 end of year reflection. I’m really not sure how much longer / how many years I can keep a #photo365 going to be honest.

Waking Up in a New World

I posted a note on the blog about LLMs and their experience of ‘waking up’ in the chat window though the lens of Isekai:

Whilst Isekai this isn’t a new metaphor in the LLM/AI world by any means – it does seem to be the most useful one we have on hand for the purposes of explaining to other people what is going on AND why the problem is interesting in it’s own right.

Sept 24 | Accessions

I love seeing peoples Accessions posts. Paul and Warren both do ’em regularly, so I thought I’d start doing them too.

Dipping the Stacks

Snoopy, Mario, Pikachu, and reproduction in generative AI – TechnoLlama

Leaving aside the strange phenomenon of people cheering on behalf of Disney and Nintendo (as one Twitter user remarked, “the people yearn for the boot”)

I want it, and I want it NOW! – by Michael Gentle

In pre-internet times, before the age of pointing and clicking, few things were immediately available. You had to wait for stuff to happen.

This was especially true for entertainment and leisure.

Malware is a puzzle game about your computer catching a virus | Polygon

Malware, a new puzzler by Odd Games, isn’t a playful prodding at folk memory. It may look nostalgic, what with its Windows 95-era email inbox and its series of polite gray software wizards waiting to be navigated. Do not be fooled. This is actually a clever strain of horror game. It hinges on that most primal of horror threats, in fact: infection, and the innate fear of being compromised.

Against Slop | Noah Caldwell-Gervais

The image of the dead-eyed, hunched-over gamer letting garish colors and a cacophony of beeps and bloops wash over them is ultimately not a stereotype or an indictment of the players so much as it is a reflection of an industry that, even in its creative prime, struggles to conceive of its audience as capable of more than that.

Pokimane is the Most-Followed Female Twitch Streamer. How Did She Get There?

Pokimane is becoming the poster girl for a generation of creators gaining serious traction and slowly emerging from their niche. “The nerds — we’ve been in the basement,” Rivera affirms. “We’ve been tucked away in a dark cave, and we’re degenerates, and we don’t take care of ourselves, or whatever the stigmas are. … And [now] we’re in a modern age — where gaming is cool to the people who know that it’s cool.”

Reading

I read The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall. It’s a really interesting book, but the author leans way to much into thinking that someone with hyperphantasia (about 1/5th of the population) is the default human experience. Some of the claims made in the book are total baffling to someone with no minds eye.

I read Prayer for Beginners by Archbishop Anthony Bloom in one sitting the other night. It’s a super short booklet with a great deal of depth and wisdom in it.

000 CHANNEL BLACK – _by.ALEXANDER

The other morning eve was going out for a run and asked me for a recommendation. Taking the vibe from the weather and the day I said ‘why don’t you listen to the most recent _by.ALEXANDER album. So off she went. 25mins later I get a message saying ‘this album slaps’.

000 CHANNEL BLACK is an experimental Jazz Album full of atmosphere, and thinking about it now, 4 years on after it’s release really captures something about the mood of that first pandemic year.

Don’t’ be scared off my use of the word ‘Jazz’, the album should be listened to as a complete work, and falls into some beats and bangers in the middle of the album

I’ll be writing about the new WHY? album next week. Spoiler: It’s fucking great.

Remember Kids:

As it turns out, he was deaf. He was deaf because he was dead.

Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith